Drive through Sun & Rain

Team wake up at 5:30 and unsealed the batteries and charging under the beautiful morning sun. Around 8 o’clock our batteries were almost full and we were ready to start.

The first stage of the day was 120km long from Bloemfontein to Edenburg. Averaging around 80km/h and finish the first stage in 1,5 hours. With the help of the sun we didn’t even use our batteries and drive on the very efficient speeds.

As a team strategy we decided to make 2 or 3 loops in Edenburg which was 36km long. Our GPS on the chase car stopped working suddenly so we made a wrong turn while merging to the highway and made 15km more because of this mistake. This extra kilometers we made is counted but caused us a huge problem that our auxiliary battery died in the last 5km of the loop. So we lost very valuable time till we get our new auxiliary battery which was waiting for us in the control stop. On the second loop everything went very smoothly with Ra27 averaging 80km/h.

Since we were all the time checking the weather conditions on the second stage of the race we decided not to make the third loop and drive it directly to the finish line. We knew that we were going in the rain. The stage is from Edenburg to Graiep Dam is just 115km. As we going through the last 10km’s we started to see the heavy thunderstorm. We didn’t want to trail the car and decided to drive through the rain and thunderstorm. During the last 5km the rain become very heavy and come into some electronics on the car which made the car non responsive. So we had to trail again to finish line.

After parc fermè a huge drying session started for the team and we figure out that only one of the MPPT’s were damaged on the heavy rain session. Our electronics engineers decided to connect two solar panel module to one MPPT to at least not to loose 1/3 of the solar power we can get.

Ra27 made 303.2km which was another personal record for the team, which is 2.2km more than the previous day which was also a record.